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Maintaining data quality is crucial in any Salesforce organization. Junk data makes reporting more complicated, reduces the accuracy of business metrics, and requires significant time to both identify and fix.

In an attempt to avoid these problems, administrators frequently increase the number of required fields and active validation rules. No doubt these features play an extremely important role in data maintenance, but when a user is in a hurry to quickly put new information in the system, they create their own headache.

Reps trying to quickly add new leads may input fake data (with the intention of going back and fixing it later) in order to pass all the tests letting them save each record, or else they might just let their pile of paper notes on new leads grow beside their monitor until their supervisor forces them to chop it down, or until they start hearing their colleagues calling their leads and they can’t figure out why they weren’t already in the system.

Enabling Salesforce’s Quick Create functionality allows data to be added without any headaches for the sales reps, but you cannot customize what fields appear there, and any record added there is able to completely ignore all validation rules you have established. Most administrators I have spoken to disabled this feature long ago.

So how do you maintain the integrity of your data while also giving your team the ability to quickly enter new records? I’ve recently implemented a solution that may help solve both problems: give your reps a Quick Create record type!

To get started, go to Setup -> Customize -> Leads -> Page Layouts -> New. Remove any fields that are not absolutely crucial or required by the system, arrange them so that your users can quickly tab from field to field, and set the page-level security to required for anything you’re not willing to go without. Add Record Type to the page layout and save.

Next, go to Record Types -> New, and call it Quick Create. Be sure to tick the checkbox marked Active and assign it to any profiles you want to have access, and click Next. Now you will assign one lead layout to all profiles. Choose the new layout you created and click Save.

Finally, under Setup -> Manage Users -> Users, log in as a few different users and try out your new record type to ensure there aren’t any validation rules needing modification. Once you’ve verified that everything is working correctly, let your reps know they can now begin using the new feature.

Going forward, you can easily eliminate these records from reports and lists by filtering out records with the Quick Create type. You can create lists and reports to only show these records as well, and if a user is ready to reach out to a Quick Create Lead, all they have to do to gain access to all the necessary fields is click [Change] next to the Record Type field on the detail page.

My users and administrators love Quick Create, and I think yours will too! Give it a try and see if it works for your company today. And don’t forget to let us know how it works for you!

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